Happy 10th N7 day to all fellow Mass Effect fans. Unfortunately, today feels more like a funeral for the franchise than anything else. Was truly hoping for a remaster to be announced today, but I shouldn't have expected that knowing how out of touch EA is and how inept their marketing department is.

Anyone else think the E in EA's logo looks like the symbol for a capacitor? That always bothered me, as they don't do hardware or anything. Hell they don't do software very well either, but I guess that's beside the point.

Anyone else think the E in EA's logo looks like the symbol for a capacitor? That always bothered me, as they don't do hardware or anything. Hell they don't do software very well either, but I guess that's beside the point.

I can't muster the desire to return to this game. I've probably played through the original trilogy more than ten times, but I've only played through Andromeda once. I've tried to start new games, but this game lacks a hook to bring me in. I simply do not care about the story or the characters in it. There are few if any decisions to make, and the ones you do have to make have little consequence. In my view, here's a very brief explanation of what happened:

1. BioWare puts reserve team studio (BioWare Montreal) in charge of Andromeda's development
2. Montreal employs/hires a bunch of Mass Effect fanboys and fangirls to develop the game
3. Fanboys/fangirls are fixated on a feature that was peripheral in Mass Effect 1 (exploration)
4. Years of development wasted on procedural generation technology (that never had a chance to support the type of depth and detail expected in Mass Effect games) in order to satiate the devs' fixation on exploration
5. Game thrown together in a year
6. Disastrous release

I can't muster the desire to return to this game. I've probably played through the original trilogy more than ten times, but I've only played through Andromeda once. I've tried to start new games, but this game lacks a hook to bring me in. I simply do not care about the story or the characters in it. There are few if any decisions to make, and the ones you do have to make have little consequence. In my view, here's a very brief explanation of what happened:

1. BioWare puts reserve team studio (BioWare Montreal) in charge of Andromeda's development
2. Montreal employs/hires a bunch of Mass Effect fanboys and fangirls to develop the game
3. Fanboys/fangirls are fixated on a feature that was peripheral in Mass Effect 1 (exploration)
4. Years of development wasted on procedural generation technology (that never had a chance to support the type of depth and detail expected in Mass Effect games) in order to satiate the devs' fixation on exploration
5. Game thrown together in a year
6. Disastrous release

For me there are other core reasons why the games reception was luke warm (apart from the rushed timing after changing core decisions)
The game had some positive points after all:
-good combat
-good vehicle mechanics
-more freedom in level-traversal + relatively large levels
-well crafted player-ship

The points that I think are what kicked the game in the butt where also core design failures :
-bad dialogs and choices (the renegade + paragon system was certainly more entertaining than this confused design with 4 "approaches" that did not mean anything in the end)
-lacking meaningful impact of decisions in general
-bad voice recordings (not all characters but many had really bored out voice acting)
-political agendas / pressing social statements (uglifyingthe female lead, placatively pushing gender equality topics)
-flat stereotypical storyline, using used up tropes to present the "evil" guys.
-uninspired new species (only one, and a boring one at that). The "first contact" situation is meaningless pretty quickly.

those choices are failures of the design stage, and could not be solved by just giving them more development time.